Online ordering for restaurant chains, with a straight answer on multi-location

Planning direct ordering for a group

A multi-site group buying ordering software usually asks first about central control and second about commission. The order should probably be reversed. Commission is the number that is costing the group money every day at every site; central control is a convenience that matters once the sites are live. Here is how to plan it so the convenience question does not block the money question.

The pilot decides everything

Pick one site to run direct ordering for a month before anyone else is involved. Choose it for its regulars, not its revenue: the location where the same faces come in every week is where a direct link moves orders fastest. The pilot teaches you the pickup lead time the kitchen can hold, where the tablet needs to sit, what the table QR cards should say, and how the delivery radius should be drawn for that kind of neighbourhood. None of that transfers from a vendor demo. All of it transfers to the next eleven sites.

Naming discipline replaces a shared menu

Without a central menu editor, consistency comes from a document. Write the category list, item names, variant conventions (“Regular / Large”, not “Reg / Lg” at one site and “Medium / Big” at another), add-on groups and photo guidelines, and have every site build to it. Then have one person check each new site’s menu against the document before it goes live. It is an hour’s work per site and it is the difference between a chain and twelve shops with the same sign. When a central editor is something we can offer you, the sites that were built to a template are the ones that migrate cleanly.

Local settings are supposed to differ

The temptation in a group is to standardise everything. Hours, delivery areas and charges should not be standardised. A city-centre site with office trade should run pickup from 11:30 and a tiny delivery radius. A suburban site with family trade should run delivery until late across a wider area with a rider on the payroll. Per-site configuration is the right design for this; the mistake is treating it as a limitation and copying the pilot’s settings everywhere.

Franchisees, billing and who owns the order

Each location’s ordering site carries that location’s orders, and the customer details on those orders sit with the site that served them. For franchised groups that is usually the right answer: the franchisee’s regulars are the franchisee’s. The subscription structure for a group is agreed with us rather than set by the software; bring the ownership map to that conversation. Nothing on this site should be read as a price for a group, because the pricing page is where that lives.

Marketing is per location, and that is an advantage

Each site has its own Google Business Profile, its own neighbourhood and its own regulars. The ordering link goes on each site’s profile, each site’s tables and each site’s bags. Group-level campaigns can point to the main website’s location list, which links out to each page. This is one of the few places where the absence of a single domain picker is almost helpful: the link a customer finds is already the link for their site.

Measuring without a group dashboard

There is no group reporting in Tuckly today. What each site has is a complete order record, and what the group has is its POS. A weekly count of direct orders per site, taken from each order screen and put into the spreadsheet the operations team already uses, is enough to see which sites are moving regulars across and which are not. The site that is not moving is almost always the site without the QR on the tables, which is an operations fix rather than a software one. The commission calculator is worth running per site with that site’s real marketplace volume, because the sites with the highest commission bills are the ones to work on first.